George RR Martin Slams adaptations, writers who make stories their own

George RR Martin recently went to his personal blog to double down on his problem with Hollywood adaptations and screenwriters’ attempts to appropriate source material. Martin previously spoke out on this issue in 2022 during a conversation with fellow author Neil Gaiman, in which he lamented the fact that the majority of writers in Hollywood believed they did not have to be faithful to written works they were adapting were for film or television.

“Very little has changed since then,” Martin now wrote on his blog. “If anything, things have gotten worse. Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to “make” great stories their own. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, JRR Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, whoever.

“No matter how important a writer is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone there who thinks they can do better, who is eager to take the story and ‘improve’ it,” Martin added. “’The book is the book, the movie is the movie,’ they will tell you, as if saying something profound. They then make the story their own. Although they never make it better. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

However, Martin said that “every now and then we get a really good adaptation of a really good book, and when that happens it deserves applause.” Such is the case with FX’s recent adaptation of “Shogun,” which is currently considered the frontrunner for the Emmy for drama series.

“I was dubious when I first heard they were doing another version of the Clavell novel,” Martin wrote. “It was a long time ago, a very long LONG time, but I read the book when it first came out in the late 1970s and was extremely impressed. And the 1980 miniseries, starring Richard Chamberlain as the Anjin, was a landmark in long-form television, as was “Roots”; Why do it again if that version was so good?

“But I’m glad they did,” he continued. “The new ‘Shogun’ is fantastic… I think the author would have been pleased. Both old and new screenwriters respected the source material and gave us great adaptations, resisting the impulse to ‘make it their own’.”

During his conversation with Gaiman in 2022, Martin asked: “How faithful should you be? Some people don’t feel like they have to be faithful at all. There’s a phrase going around: “I’m going to make it my own.” I hate that sentence. And I think Neil probably hates that line too.

“Yes,” Gaiman replied. “I’ve been watching people make ‘Sandman’ their own for thirty years. And some of those people hadn’t even read ‘Sandman’ to get their own spin on it, they’d just gone through some comics or something.”

FX is currently developing a second season of ‘Shogun’. Read Martin’s full blog post here.